Return journey

Steve Pratt reviews the relevance of the 75th anniversary edition.

‘STOCKTON,” wrote JB Priestley in his 1934 book English Journey, “is better-looking than Middlesbrough, but not so cheerful and prosperous as its other neighbour, Darlington, which is still enjoying the favours of the London and North-Eastern Railway.”

He found Tyneside people “not so bad once you got to know them, though even to a Yorkshire lad they appeared uncouth”, but found the local accent a “most barbarous, monotonous and irritating twang”.

And a visit to Shotton Colliery proved so awful – because of the smoking, sulphurous giant “tip” of coal dust and slag – that he said: “Let’s get out of this horror.”

Yet, what he saw in a Depression-hit country led him to protest about the plight of those living and working in the industrial regions, especially miners in east Durham. It caused great debate on its publication.

In the Thirties, Bradford-born Priestley, author of novels like The Good Companions and plays including An Inspector Calls and When We Are Married, became more concerned about social issues. His book English Journey offered his observations and views on the people and places of Britain as he travelled from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North-East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home in the autumn of 1933. For the first time in 25 years, the book is being published in full.

His son, Tom Priestley, feels that it’s a book that will always be relevant. “People now realise it’s an amazing archive of life then and offers the ability to compare with what’s happened since.”

He sees it as a key work of his father “because with it he found his voice as a social commentator”.

These days, he says, his father couldn’t have made the journey in the same way. “The joy of it was he already had a reputation as a writer but no one knew what he looked like, so he could go up and talk to people and they’d answer quite frankly. These days, you wave a camera in front of someone and everyone is acting.”

Priestley reported on lives of which people in other more prosperous parts of the country had no idea. “We reached the Great North Road.

Along its deserted length, the raindrops were bouncing merrily,” he writes.

“There was no more colour in the day itself than there is in a bundle of steel rods, but up to Darlington the red ruins of autumn were still about us. At the great divide of the North Road, Scotch Corner, which ought to be the most romantic spot in the country but somehow is not, we turned right for Darlington; and while the rain still spouted into the main street there, I sat upstairs in a cafe and ate roast mutton and treacle pudding.”

Priestley had been in Tynemouth before so was familiar with North Shields, South Shields, Jarrow, Gateshead and Newcastle – “which promised us a good tea and a show at the Hippodrome or the Empire.” But he recalls taking a great dislike to the whole district, which seemed so ugly that it made the West Riding towns look like inland resorts.

He disliked the Geordie accent. “As a rule I like local accents, and have kept one myself,”

he writes.

“They make for variety in speech and they give men’s talk a flavour of the particular countryside to which at heart they belong.

“Probably, if I had spent most of my impressionable years near the Tyne and had known the ecstasies of first love in Newcastle’s Jesmond Dene, I might have discovered treasures of cadence in the local accent; but as it is, I can find nothing pleasant to say about it. To my ears, it still sounds a most barbarous, monotonous and irritating twang.”

East Durham and the Tees, a coal-mining district that few knew, occupies much of his attention.

“I did not really want to see it now, for I knew that it would be ugly and I had had enough of ugliness; but I felt that I should be a fraud on this particular journey, if I went sneaking past east Durham.”

As he passed over the high level bridge at Sunderland, he reflected that “there is, I believe, considerable unemployment and distress in the town, it looked fairly prosperous, clean and bright that morning.”

Along the coast road, he came upon men wheeling bicycles loaded with small sacks of coal. He heard afterwards that these men descend very steep cliffs near Seaham Harbour to pick up coal from the shore and sell it.

“Those people who still believe that the working folk of this country live in an enervating atmosphere of free bread and circuses might like to try this coal-picking enterprise for a day or two,” he writes.

Seaham Harbour’s position on the coast didn’t relieve it of any of the usual dreariness of colliery towns. “It is a mining town and its citizens are all being shockingly underpaid. They earn about two pounds a week – with luck. A town on those wages is not a pretty sight.”

He wouldn’t blame the miner for hating the whole coal-burning public. “More often than not he lives in a region so unlovely, so completely removed from either natural beauty or anything of grace or dignity contrived by man, that most of us take care never to go near a colliery area.

The time he does not spend underground is spent in towns and villages that are monuments of mean ugliness.”

Then it’s on to Middlesbrough where the chief passion, so he understands, is beer and football.

“It is a dismal town, even with beer and football,”

he concludes.

Even arriving in York – “the guide book man’s paradise” – does little to cheer him as he admits that the city has never yet enchanted him.

“It did not succeed on this last visit, though it tried hard enough, for when I arrived there, still brooding over the miseries of the Tyne and the Tees, I found the whole city glittering with coloured lights. It was as if Blackpool had just paid a call,” he writes.

■ Newcastle’s Discovery Museum, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary, welcomes Tom Priestley among speakers at an event today, at 6pm, to mark the new edition of the book. Free, book in advance by calling Janette Murphy on 0191-277-2307 or email janette.murphy@twmuseums.org.uk ■ English Journey by JB Priestley (Great Northern Books, £25).